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Thus what we know as pleasure and pain may be identified:
pain is our perception of a body despoiled, deprived of the image
of the soul; pleasure our perception of the living frame in which
the image of the soul is brought back to harmonious bodily
operation. The painful experience takes place in that living
frame; but the perception of it belongs to the sensitive phase of
the soul, which, as neighbouring the living body, feels the
change and makes it known to the principle, the imaging faculty,
into which the sensations finally merge; then the body feels the
pain, or at least the body is affected: thus in an amputation,
when the flesh is cut the cutting is an event within the material
mass; but the pain felt in that mass is there felt because it is
not a mass pure and simple, but a mass under certain
[non-material] conditions; it is to that modified substance that
the sting of the pain is present, and the soul feels it by an
adoption due to what we think of as proximity.
And, itself unaffected, it feels the corporeal conditions at
every point of its being, and is thereby enabled to assign every
condition to the exact spot at which the wound or pain occurs.
Being present as a whole at every point of the body, if it were
itself affected the pain would take it at every point, and it
would suffer as one entire being, so that it could not know, or
make known, the spot affected; it could say only that at the
place of its presence there existed pain- and the place of its
presence is the entire human being. As things are, when the
finger pains the man is in pain because one of his members is in
pain; we class him as suffering, from his finger being painful,
just as we class him as fair from his eyes being blue.
But the pain itself is in the part affected unless we include in
the notion of pain the sensation following upon it, in which case
we are saying only that distress implies the perception of
distress. But [this does not mean that the soul is affected] we
cannot describe the perception itself as distress; it is the
knowledge of the distress and, being knowledge, is not itself
affected, or it could not know and convey a true message: a
messenger, affected, overwhelmed by the event, would either not
convey the message or not convey it faithfully.
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